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Trading data in the EU – When third parties can buy the washing machine’s breakdown log – News

23 February 2022

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The movement of goods in the EU is accompanied by an ever-increasing flow of data. Because there is not a sufficient basis for trading in such data, the EU Commission is now creating a law.

Author:
Charles Liebherr, Brussels

Thanks to the free movement of goods, Czech washing machines can be found in Belgian family homes. French service employees deliver spare parts if necessary. All these transactions leave a large data trail.

The manufacturer of the washing machines would like to know which parts need to be replaced sooner than expected. However, private households prefer the small, independent service staff in the district and not those from the wholesaler. It would be helpful for both of them to be able to access third-party data in order to turn it into a business.

Most of the data is not used

There is no lack of data in the European single market; there is an abundance of them. Every year the amount of company data produced, stored and transferred to data centers increases. The EU Commission has analyzed that 80 percent of this data remains unused in storage.

A data law, a so-called Data Act, is intended to change that. It defines framework conditions for data exchange in the triangle of companies, customers and third parties who want to access parts of this data under certain conditions.

The EU’s new data law aims to enable data trading. It also regulates the conditions under which government agencies can evaluate private business data in the public interest, for example for contact tracing in the event of a pandemic. It complements the Data Protection Act, which sanctions misuse of data. It also regulates how private customers, who often produce large parts of this company data, can use or transfer their data, for example if they want to move their digital photo album from one provider to the next.

The advantage for the family homeowner in Belgium could be that he can have his washing machine serviced very cheaply by an independent local repair service, because this service covers ten manufacturers and, in the best case, knows in advance when the next machine will fail, because he is around the watch evaluates all breakdown reports from all manufacturers in Europe.

EU wants to advance digitization

This brave, new, digital business world must be based on understandable, fair rules. For example, a small local service company has the same right to access washing machine breakdown logs as large corporations offering their services across Europe.

More transparency, more control options, more efficient data transfers, new business ideas: the EU’s new data law is intended to bring the long overdue big impetus to the digitization of society. At least that’s what the EU Commission promises. The proposed law is now going to parliament and the EU member states for deliberation.